


I Dreamed a World and Called it Love

by honeyheffron



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings, bros with feelings, john is only mentioned in passing tho, mentions of children, pro homo, they kinda wanna spend the rest of their lives together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 00:35:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18377309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honeyheffron/pseuds/honeyheffron
Summary: “Would you ever want that?” George finally asks, eyes still firmly glued to the ceiling. Another rush of quick footsteps and childish giggles pulses across the plaster overhead.Ringo tries to make a joke, still unsure of the sudden path they’re on—“What, a shit boyfriend?”George huffs in momentary frustration. “No, y’daft git, would you ever want…you know. Little ones.”Or, George and Ringo's early morning reflections.





	I Dreamed a World and Called it Love

**Author's Note:**

> Title lifted from Jim Hodges' 2016 art exhibition.

Ringo wakes to sunbeams and softness.

Sunbeams, for golden paths of brilliance trailing kisses along their sleep-wrought, drowsing cheekbones—and softness, for the elegant lines and flower-petal skin of a lover resting steadily beside him.

It’s something out of a perfect photograph—all the right shadows, orange-yellow warmth, a careful sense of calm too sacred to be disturbed. 

Ringo blinks, and lets George’s temperate breaths across from him guide his way to wakefulness. The pale expanse of his back extends like a canvas, pretty with possibility. Ringo traces a careful finger along a purple-red kiss left at the curve of George’s shoulder, and feels an odd flutter at the side of his neck, where he knows a matching one lies upon his own skin. He can’t help his grin.

He loves George like this—relaxed, unvarnished, warm like home. He loves him always, in fact, but moments like these are his favorites.

Ringo leans over, propping himself up on an elbow to press a tender kiss to the back of George’s neck—which then turns into several sweet kisses along the bend of his shoulder, and a gentle squeeze of his hip. 

In the onslaught of sleepy affection, George releases a contented sigh, the beginnings of the day tugging at his own bones and begging him to consciousness. As indulgent lips continue their trek across the plains and valleys of his shoulders, he reaches back to tangle his fingers with Ringo’s own, lightly squeezing where they rest at his hip. _Good morning._

“What’s all this about, then?” George murmurs, as Ringo presses one last kiss to the sun-brushed skin of his neck. Ringo moves to hook his chin over his shoulder and George smiles effortlessly, dozy eyes still shut. 

“Dunno. Just thought y’looked pretty,” Ringo replies, somehow both teasing and entirely honest.

George shifts to lie on his back, eyes finally fluttering open to look at Ringo, shiny and hazel and impossibly thoughtful. He leans up to press their lips together, and Ringo’s toes curl with the warmth they create.

“Charmer,” George says, once they part, low and playful.

“One of me best qualities,” Ringo quips, “Or so my mother says.”

“Filling your head with notions, that woman,” George shakes his head ruefully, a tiny smirk beginning at the corners of his lips.

“Oi, you watch how you talk abou’ ol’ missus Starkey or I may just leave you in this bed alone to freeze,” Ringo teases back, knocking his ankle against George’s under their cream-colored sheets.

George burrows himself deeper into Ringo’s side, as if daring him to try it. “I think y’like me too much for tha’,” he grins.

“S’pose I’m a sentimentalist,” Ringo admits with a good-natured shrug.

“So you are,” George hums in agreement, and Ringo can feel the broad smile against his neck, “What time is it?”

Ringo cranes his neck to get a glance at the clock on his bedside table. “Quarter past seven, looks like.”

“ _Fuck,_ why are we awake?”

“Dunno, jus’—” 

He’s suddenly cut off by a familiar thumping above them, their ceiling seeming to shake ever so slightly with the reverberations. High-pitched laughter soon follows, unmistakable, mischievous giggles of children muffled by the barrier above them. Ringo sighs indulgently, knowing in a manner born purely of routine.

“Guess we just missed wakin’ up the fanfare,” Ringo grins up at their ceiling, sounds of tiny footsteps still bounding above them.

George laughs softly, more of an amused breath through his nose. “Those are that nice bird Lucy’s little buggers running ‘round up there, yeah?”

“Mm, yeah. Good lass, she is. She came by about the time I first moved in, long before you came mucking about in me flat,” Ringo earns a sharp kick in the shin for his cheek, then, but continues on through his smug grin, “She came with sweets and apologized for her kiddos being so loud in the early morning. She said her boyfriend had left her only a few months earlier and she was still figurin’ it all out. I told her not to fret, course.”

Ringo expects a snarky remark about poor Lucy’s knob of a boyfriend from George, ever unamused by humanity’s shortcomings never one to ignore the opportunity to shit on a shitty person. Instead, there is silence—the kind of silence Ringo knows often dares to swallow George whole in a sea of uneasiness and discontent.

Ringo turns to him and wants to say soft and low, _penny for your thoughts_ —but George has a faraway look in his eye that Ringo can’t quite place. He stares up at the ceiling like it may hold all the answers to the universe, his trademark thoughtfulness plain and glaring in the golden tracks of early morning sun.

“Would you ever want that?” George finally asks, eyes still firmly glued to the ceiling. Another rush of quick footsteps and childish giggles pulses across the plaster overhead.

Ringo tries to make a joke, still unsure of the sudden path they’re on—“What, a shit boyfriend?”

George huffs in momentary frustration. “No, y’daft git, would you ever want…you know. Little ones.” 

There’s a crease forming at George’s razor-sharp brow that Ringo can’t help but revel in, even for a moment. He’s never quite seen George like this, wordlessly stumbling through his thoughts so openly; he looks almost _nervous,_ unsure in a way that seems the antithesis of who he so typically is. George is quiet, but never afraid. It’s an oddly charming variation—almost metamorphic. 

Ringo makes a contemplative noise. “Dunno. Maybe someday. Would you?”

George releases a breath. “Yeah. Maybe someday. I don’t—I don’t know if I’d be any good.”

Ringo starts at that, turning to glance over at George’s face again. “What do y’mean?”

“Kids bring a lot of responsibilities, like. Wouldn’t wan’ to…mess anything up, I guess.”

George picks at a hangnail like he’s worried about what he might say if he doesn’t give his hands something to do. Insecurity seems to bleed from him—George is never nonsensical in his confidence, but he’s not always forthright with his self-doubt, either, and the sudden disregard for this fact has Ringo stumbling, if only for a moment.

In true Beatle-fashion, however, he plows on. “Funny, s’what my da’ told me he was nervous about before they had me,” Ringo begins, so sincere it gets George to finally turn and look at him, “Then I grew up to be a queer drummer in a rock and roll band and he seems to be handlin’ that pretty well, so.”

There’s an affectionate roll of his eyes before George laughs heartily, little vampire teeth on full display. Tension drains from the room like cigarette smoke, thick and forbidding one moment and pale and dissipating the next. 

An amused, earnest glint comes to replace the shifting apprehension in George’s gaze as he finally looks at Ringo, his smile small but bright. 

Ringo releases a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

“You’d be a great father, you know,” George says, running his thumb over Ringo’s knuckles offhandedly, “Maybe even better than mine, and he punched a teacher for canin’ me in secondary school.”

Ringo shakes his head wryly, “That man’s a hero, Geo, you can’t hold me to that.” 

George grins. Ringo says, after a beat, “I think you’d be a great father, too. Cor, our kids would be _fantastic._ ”

“Think so?”

“Sure! With your brains and my proper good looks we’d likely have ourselves a couple of mini Casanovas,” Ringo teases. 

George snorts, tossing a stray pillow right at Ringo’s face. “Sure thing, Romeo.”

Ringo throws the pillow right back, which incites the Harrison-patented, _really, now?_ look of warning few men have ever dared to challenge (except maybe one John Lennon, and he’s never won anyhow.) He throws his hands up in mock surrender. A man’s got to know when to pick his battles.

“Only jokin’, luv, honest,” Ringo placates, and George gives him a sideways smile.

“I do think we’d raise great kids, though,” he continues, both surprising and disgusting himself with how dewy he sounds, “Wouldn’t wanna do it with anyone else.”

George flushes prettily. “You’re gettin’ soft, Starkey,” he murmurs, but kisses Ringo long and hard anyway. 

Another set of tiny, pounding footsteps above shakes them from their reverie, though their smiles are full and wide as they part.

George spares a quick glance at the ceiling. “Maybe we ought to ask Lucy if she’d like a day off, sometime. We could help out. You know, babysittin’.”

Ringo can’t help the way his brows shoot up in surprise. “Yeah?”

George meets his gaze once more. “Yeah. We’d be good, I think.”

Ringo smiles so wide his eyes water, soaks in the sunbeams dancing along George’s hair once more and repeats the words like a prayer. “Right. We’d be good.”

**Author's Note:**

> i dig comments & feedback!! feel free to share your thoughts with me here or on my tumblr @honeyheffron :'D


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